Beyond Tree Planting in Urban Forest Climate Adaptation Actions

Forests in cities, and the communities that steward and benefit from them, face significant disruption due to climate change. It is now time to build the capacity in our institutions and in forested natural areas to help navigate multiple overlapping crises and systems change. This case study from Seattle, Washington provides perspective on how to mitigate climate change beyond tree planting

Climate Change Vulnerability and Response in Seattle’s Urban Natural Areas

Green Seattle Partnership (GSP) was originally conceptualized as a 20-year program to drive recovery of the city’s forested natural areas. Now in year fourteen of the restoration effort, Seattle Parks and Recreation, the lead agency for GSP, is undertaking an analysis of current ecological conditions using on-the-ground and remotely sensed data to better understand climate change exposures. This work helps build the program’s long-range perspective while offering immediate strategies to help the natural areas adapt to existing and anticipated environmental change

Green Seattle Partnership Models Regional Urban Natural Areas Restoration Efforts

The Green Seattle Partnership (GSP) was launched in 2005 to create a model for urban forest natural area restoration in the Puget Sound region of western Washington. To date, thirteen other municipalities and one county have adopted the Green City Partnership model to utilize a 20-year strategic planning process to prioritize and guide natural area restoration programing. Initial planning work includes taking stock of the community and ecological resources and defining costs. Not all prioritization and planning efforts live in the strategic plan. During the fourteen years since the launch of the GSP, annual planning efforts have been responsive to broader city and community priorities, as well as to current conditions captured in work records and monitoring data